Once I reached the top of it, I had to then spend a few minutes crawling up the slanted side of the roof before reaching (what I hoped) would be its flat part, from where I could hear muted voices and giggling. The Skillshare’s staircase was especially steep and rusty. Maybe I have issues, I don’t know, but I just don’t like the idea of falling. In the few weeks I had been in Montreal, I had done everything from drinking to reading to beating my dusty carpet with a tennis racket on a rooftop, but my heart still skipped a beat whenever I ran up the steep, narrow, curved staircases. You have the underground city, where there’s not only the metro, but shops and even (gasp) apartments there’s the regular ground-level hustle and bustle, but there’s also what can only be described as a city on rooftops: so much life happens on top of buildings, apartments, houses. The door was actually unlocked (it was that kind of place), and there was a sign in the front hallway that said, “Reading Rainbow is on the roof,” with an arrow pointing upwards - I guess in case someone got confused about the location of the roof. When I knocked on the door, there was no answer, so, determined not to let something as silly as etiquette stand between me and a gay book club, I just tried letting myself in. I got to the Skillshare half an hour late (I am always late).
I had to work really hard to get to this book: step one was googling something along the lines of “gay book club Montreal lesbians new friends ” step two was finding my way to this old house in St-Henri where Google had told me I would find an art collective, the Ste-Emilie Skillshare, that held a “Reading Rainbow ” step three involved climbing onto a roof. The first time I started reading Cereus Blooms at Night was on a rooftop in Montreal. Written by Shani Mootoo, the queer Irish-born writer who grew up in Trinidad but moved to Canada as an adult, it explores themes of gender and sexuality against the backdrop of a Caribbean paradise. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian CinemaĬereus Blooms at Night is a magical book.
LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.
0 kommentar(er)
